A History of English Language

A history of the english language 296
sorts of speech which make them entirely impossible in certain professions.” Statements
such as Shaw’s reporting a bias against certain ways of speaking and the practical
economic effect of that bias have been made by enlightened linguists who do not share
the bias at all and who aim to remedy its practical effect. However, the topic is fraught
with pitfalls for well-meaning observers and authorities, and the movement for
bidialectalism during the 1960s was criticized on these grounds. 7 James Milroy cites
ostensibly objective studies of linguistic variation and says of their treatment: “This has
the effect of marginalizing non-standard vernaculars—appearing to present them as
abnormal or pathological language states—when the majority of human beings
throughout history must have used varieties that were, to a greater or lesser extent,
nonstandard.” 8 Thus, the tendency of the historical linguist is often to present the
development of the language retrospectively as a uniform dialect proceeding in a straight
line toward Received Standard English. The implicit ideology of the dispassionate and
scientific study of the language may inadvertently reinforce the very bias that the
linguists criticize as naïve and unfortunate. The irony is especially acute if the speaker of
the standard variety happens to be pretentious or prolix. Listeners even of the same social
class may find the speech of one who employs language of the literary variety in their
conversation, who talks like a book, an obstacle to free intercourse, because they
associate such language with stiff and pedantic qualities of mind or a lack of social ease.
In this case what is objected to has clearly nothing to do with the question of correctness.
It is a question merely of appropriateness to the occasion. As in numerous other linguistic
matters, we have come in recent times to look upon the different types of speech more
tolerantly, to recognize them as one of the phenomena of language. We do not expect (or
wish) people to talk like Matthew Arnold, and we do not include in a sweeping
condemnation all those who fail to conform to the spoken standard of the educated. In
recent years a sometimes strident discussion among linguists and sociologists has dealt
with the relations between the standard dialects of the middle classes and the nonstandard
dialects of lower socioeconomic groups. African American Vernacular English in the
United States presents especially vexed questions for the educational system and society
as a whole (see § 250.8). The issues are finally economic, political, and psychological in
a debate that seems far from arriving at a satisfactory resolution.
227. The Standard Speech.
The spoken standard or, as it is called in Britain, Received Pronunciation, often
abbreviated RP, is something that varies in different parts of the English-speaking world.
In Britain it is a type of English perhaps best exemplified in the speech of those educated
in the great public schools but spoken also with a fair degree of uniformity by cultivated
7
See James Sledd, “Bi-dialectalism: The Linguistics of White Supremacy,” English Journal, 58
(1969), 1307–15; and Rosina Lippi-Green, English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and
Discrimination in the United States (London, 1997).
8
Linguistic Variation and Change (Oxford, UK, 1992), p. 52.